The Swedish school is today a meeting place for many people with different cultures. The teacher education at Södertörn University have since 2002 been influenced by an intercultural profile. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the intercultural profile of Södertörn University is expressed in preschool- teachers/ teachers work. Is an intercultural approach requested in schools and is intercultural approach useful and applicable in the teaching profession? The report is based on a qualitative study of what intercultural Competence means for five preschool- teachers/ teachers who have graduated from Södertörn University.

This analysis is about the fourth basic Competence and how you can define it, what it includes and if it is possible to find it in the new curriculum for the Swedish high school; Gymnasiereformen -07. The analysis was focused on the following subjects; Mathematics, Social science and Swedish. The aim with this analysis has been to create a summary in the field of information literacy and to define the fourth basic Competence. The analysis were focused on and delimited by the following conceptions; information literacy, digital Competence and the information search process. The sources of information has primarily been taken from the field of information literacy and statements from professionals in the fields of information literacy and education.

The aim of this study is to investigate how employees in consulting companies develop their Competence in order to perform their daily work. The focus is on informal Competence development. The theoretical framework consists of theories concerning learning and Competence development in working life, theories on organizational change and evaluation, a well as professional reflection. The methods applied are narrative research and interviews based on the assumption that knowledge about reality is only obtainable through language and communication.The main results show that Competence is developed through experience, social interaction, communication and dialog with co-workers and customers. The post-modern conceptions of the rapid (technical) development and need to be up-to-date has a strong hold on the informants apprehension of working life, as does the notion of not having enough time for all the Competence development they would like.

Social Competence is an effective weapon at all costs on today?s market. In many job ads we can see the words to be socially competent. In our report we have studied the subject?s social Competence, relations, relationship marketing and personal networks and looked to the connection these subjects have to one another.

This study is based on my work as a teacher of Swedish language and literature to upper secondary school students, and my interest in developing the teaching of literature by using both new criticism theories and theories of literary perception focusing on reader response. The purpose of the study is to examine the learning process in trying to develop literary Competence and to find out how to describe the Competence shown by the students. My starting-point is a discussion about literary Competence and the theory and model of literary Competence by Örjan Torell. In examining literary Competence, by how students use their constitutional Competence as well as performance and literary transfer Competences, Torell´s model shows the possibility and the need for both knowledge of literature and personal reception by focusing on the dialogue between author and reader.The method is qualitative and the empirics are material collected in one senior high school class in the Social Science programme during their second and third year. The material contains written reading logs, written answers to tasks and transcribed recordings of discussions of literature.The analysis shows a variety among the literary Competence shown and developed by the students and points to the complexity of understanding the concept of literary Competence.

Ethical Competence is an important precondition when people are to respond to moral problem situations as efficiently as possible. In these situations it is not easy to make choices and decisions, especially when many stakeholders are involved with various opinions and interests.The purpose of this thesis was to generate a web-based support tool to train and promote ethical Competence of the users of this tool.We first created a theoretical basis by studying the major theories of ethics in general and ethical Competence in particular. The importance of ethical Competence and its main subject, namely, the autonomy in the theoretical part described and specified. In addition has the practical ethical reflection over morality preferred and characterized to the classical ethical passivity over morality. We have also preferred and characterized the autonomous thinking to the heteronomous one.Based on the theoretical base a prototype tool to support the training of ethical Competence was designed and developed.

Learning organizations and organizational development are interesting subjects that does not examine municipal organizations and private organizations an equal amount.  Furthermore, there exists little research on the effects of Competence development for individuals in a leadership role within organizations. Because of this, we wanted to examine the impact of Competence development in business modeling and how it affected local government activities. Competence development is used by organizations to develop their business and achieve a greater competitive advantage, but does Competence development for individuals in a leadership role lead to organizational development? This paper examines Competence development in the form of a business modeling course via the Bitstreamproject and the effects that occur within three municipalities as a result of the Competence development. By interviewing three participants and four coworkers within different municipalities and studied the data from the Bitstream project, we can not conclude that Competence development within business modeling leads to organizational development, only that it exists a tendency for it.

During the last decade working with Competence has emerged as a more strategically important area. Today the human resources in a company are considered a competitive advance and the HR-units play a significant role when it comes to HR-management. Different motives for investing in strategies that promote Competence development and learning also exist. The purpose of this paper was to examine how the process of Competence development was managed at a large global company. The empirical material consisted of four persons who were interviewed and the analysis of the material was inspired by grounded theory.From the analysis four major themes or core factors emerged as central to the interviewed persons' understanding of the Competence development process; solid preparatory work in relation to Competence development, communication, awareness of responsibilities and finally the taking action and evaluation of the action.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the concept of Competence within the social services. More specifically it aims to find out how the social workers themselves look upon their own Competence in social investigations concerning children. As the study was based on focus groups the main questions were vague at the beginning and were cleared later on during the group sessions.In three focus group interviews in three different municipalities in southern Sweden 11 social workers were asked to discuss this issue. The interviews were then thoroughly transcribed. In the data I identified 9 themes seeming to play a special roll in the discussions about Competence: practice; experience; approach; intuition; responsibility; theories, methods and laws; reflection; resources and ethics; specialisation versus integration.The analysis made on these themes was based on two different kinds of perspective; one focusing knowing-in-action and the other focusing the organization framing the Competence considered.As a conclusion the 7 first themes can be seen as a definition of the Competence used in social investigations concerning children.

The aim of this two-year masters thesis is to look for the Swedish public library´s core business, using theories about Competence. The approach is qualitative. It is done by studying the Unesco Public Library Manifesto, the Swedish library legislation, the education in library and information science, two important Swedish library related journals and by asking public librarians about their work and point of view regarding Competence.The research shows mainly two sides of the core Competence of public librarians: information technology Competence and literature knowledge. The conclusion is that the two meet in the idea of mass education, which could therefore be called the Swedish public library´s core business..

Testing and analysis of measurement data is a major part of the workday for development engineers within the section Fluid and Emission Treatment to assure the quality of products developed by Scania CV. The ineluctable variation and therefore uncertainty of results can be quantified and discussed with the use of statistical methods.The overall objective of this study is to examine how the Competence of development engineers can be improved within the area of statistics. This has been done by relating the concept of Competence with the use of statistical methods to analyse experimental data and by investigating which factors that influence the Competence of the engineers. Observations of the daily operations, interviews and a focus group with development engineers and a workshop with management personnel, has been used as research methods in this study.The results show that the desired Competence, from the perspective of the individual, consists of knowledge, motivation and support. It is important that none of these parts are neglected when the Competence of engineers is to be strengthened.

This study is based on my work as a teacher of Swedish language and literature to upper secondary school students, and my interest in developing the teaching of literature by using both new criticism theories and theories of literary perception focusing on reader response. The purpose of the study is to examine the learning process in trying to develop literary Competence and to find out how to describe the Competence shown by the students. My starting-point is a discussion about literary Competence and the theory and model of literary Competence by Örjan Torell. In examining literary Competence, by how students use their constitutional Competence as well as performance and literary transfer Competences, Torell´s model shows the possibility and the need for both knowledge of literature and personal reception by focusing on the dialogue between author and reader.The method is qualitative and the empirics are material collected in one senior high school class in the Social Science programme during their second and third year. The material contains written reading logs, written answers to tasks and transcribed recordings of discussions of literature.The analysis shows a variety among the literary Competence shown and developed by the students and points to the complexity of understanding the concept of literary Competence.

The concept Competence is considered to be difficult to define. Therefore, it may be problematic to define Competence in business and to evaluate the level of skills of employees (Thomsen, 2010). In this study the aim has been to identify key competencies for employees working as purchasers for Skanska Nordic Procurement Unit (NPU). These key competencies will afterwards help Skanska NPU to evaluate purchasers? level of Competence.The theoretical framework of the study consists of three different parts.

Several studies have shown that the Swedish labour market for different reasons is characterized by ethnical discrimination and that people who have another cultural background than Swedish are being excluded. Most studies done within this area have been focused on why it is harder for immigrants to enter the labour market and identifying the contributing mechanisms for this phenomenon. Instead the aim of this study was to see how the immigrants view their own cultural identity and background and how they perceive that their cultural Competences are being valued when they apply for a job. To examine this, the following problematic was used: How does a person who has been brought up with both the Swedish culture and another culture look at using this as a cultural Competence when they apply for a job. Two different theories were then applied to analyze the problematic, Erving Goffman´s theory about Stigma and Norbert Elias theory about the Established and the Outsiders.

The purpose of this study is to gain understanding of how self employed entrepreneurs (hereafter referred to as ?entrepreneurs?) develop their Competence based on their perceived learning space. The main question is: How do these entrepreneurs develop their Competence based on their perceived learning space? Other questions relevant for the study are: How important is the social environment for these entrepreneurs and how do they interact with their social environment in order to develop their Competence. The study has a qualitative approach.